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The Department of Medicine organised an image competition for staff and students which yielded some fantastic entries.

The competition received 38 entries throughout the competition, all of which  provided fascinating insights into the work that is currently being conducted within the Department.

The outright winner of the competition was ‘Bone Fracture’ submitted by Duncan Bassett and Graham Williams from the Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism. This vivid and interesting image was a clear favourite with the judging panel. ‘Bone Fracture’ depicts a back-scattered electron scanning-electron microscopy image of the bone fracture surface following a destructive 3-point bend testing.

‘Bone Fracture’ was closely followed by 4 runners up. The first of which was ‘Cluster’ by Oduaghanju Okoturo-Evans, Robert Edwards and Dr John Cupitt from the Division of Experimental Medicine. This image is a heat map of the output of an experiment looking at the toxicity of carbon nanotubes. Blocks of colour represent groups of proteins which change together. The visualisation helped the research group to locate significant changes in protein abundance.

The second runner up was ‘Two Brains’ by Henrietta Bowden-Jones from the Division of Brain Sciences. The portrait is of Tim, a bright professional man diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease who agreed to be photographed by Henrietta in front of the massive image of a brain at the entrance to 51³Ô¹ÏÍø College at South Kensington. 

Henrietta writes that it was an emotional moment for both of them, as Tim’s illness had progressed and his gait had worsened. After posing for the image for some time he struggled to get walking again. Henrietta felt the enormity of the brain in the background of the image symbolised the weight of his illness and of other patients suffering from brain diseases.

This image was a clear runner up due it its emotive subject matter and really hit home with the judging panel.

The third runner up was ‘Night of the Living Glia’ by Amy Birch & Alex Renziehausen from Brain Sciences. The image shows astrocytes (pink) and microglia (red) surrounding an amyloid plaque (green) in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Glial cells are attracted to, and surround, the plaques, with microglia on the inside and astrocytes around the outside, forming a protective ‘glial scar’ that prevents healthy tissue from being damaged.

Amy is an avid horror fan; this picture reminded her of a horde of zombies surrounding a group of innocent humans, ready to eat them, hence the title ‘Night of the Living Glia’. In fact, glial cells do attack and phagocytose (or eat) amyloid, although in this case the amyloid is not innocent as it is thought to play an important role in the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease.

The fourth runner up was ‘Neon Cutaway’ by Dr Jim Myers, also from the Division of Brain Sciences.  This image is constructed from 5 PET scans of individual brains. Applying a colour code to the data provides strikingly beautiful superimpositions of the data on the model brain. In this case, blue represents low [11C]Ro 15-4513 binding, and red/white high. The limbic system is well defined and the haunting green shows the high concentration of GABAAa5 in the temporal lobe of the living human brain.

There were 38 entries in total, all of which can be viewed on the Department of Medicine .

The Department would like to thank everyone who took the time to submit an entry.